Boost your body for life

YESTERDAY I shared my easy-to-follow recipes for your first week on the 48 Hour Diet. Remember, on this plan you will eat 500 calories for only two days a week and enjoy delicious fresh food – including snacks – for the other five days.

If you have already started the plan you might be wondering about the benefits of fasting, other than weight loss. Well, if someone told you there was a pill that could reduce the risk of diabetes and heart disease and keep you looking and feeling young you’d be tempted to take it wouldn’t you?

The good news is that intermittent fasting is now considered an acceptable approach for all of the above.

Plusprovided you’re sensible about it there are no side effects other than mild hunger. Yes, you might feel a bit “yucky” at first but that is usually due to the headaches you get from caffeine withdrawal. These effects don’t usually last long and most people find they are outweighed by the benefits of fasting.

It is important to establish that fasting is not starvation, which, of course, is dangerous. This is about increasing the gaps between meals or eating less from time to time.

Fastingshifts the pounds, improves health and can help heal somebody’s relationship with food which is often at the heart of the struggle with weight.

However there is a lot to be said for common sense. No one knows your body better than you do. If it doesn’t feel right either adjust your approach or stop. Successful fasting involves an element of trial and error so it may take a while before you can fit it into your lifestyle.

Here are just some of the benefits of the 48 Hour Diet.

Intermittent fasting is now considered an acceptable approach to weight loss

HEART

Eighty per cent of cardiovascular disease is thought to be caused by poor lifestyle choices such as a bad diet. Some of the risk factors, including high levels of fat and sugar in the blood, can be improved through fasting.

Most studies on fasting show that it reduces levels of triglyceride, a kind of fat, and improves the ratio of triglycerides to “good” cholesterol or high-density lipoprotein (HDL). HDL is important because it helps remove excess cholesterol from the bloodstream.

In animal studies, resistance to what is known as “ischaemic injury” has also been seen. This is the type of artery damage that’s associated with the build-up of plaques and hardening of the arteries.

Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death worldwide and something that affects us all.

NHS statistics show that in England in 2007 people aged over 60 each received an average of 42 prescription items (each time you receive a prescription for an individual drug from your doctor it counts as one prescription item). That’s a lot of drugs.

Unsurprisingly, medication that treats cardiovascular disease and its risk factors is the most commonly prescribed.

I often meet people who want to change their eating habits not just because they’d like to look and feel better but because they’re shocked by the amount of medication that their own parents are on.

As fasting becomes more popular people are becoming attracted to it as a lifestyle choice that might help their heart and circulatory system stay healthy for longer.

BRAIN

If you’ve ever found yourself befuddled about where you’ve left your keys, phone or purse, you’ll know that memory loss is frightening.

At Baltimore’s National Institute on Aging, mice that fasted every other day remembered their way around a maze more easily than mice put on a sugary diet.

What about skipping breakfast, seen as an important “brain food”? Interestingly children who eat breakfast tend to perform better in cognitive tests but this isn’t the case for adults.

Studies have shown that short-term food reduction doesn’t impair cognitive function in adults. Prolonged dieting, on the other hand, does. This means that the perceived deterioration in brain function may in fact have a psychological cause.

So lack of concentration may be a result of the stress of being “on a diet” rather than the diet itself.

It’s true that the brain uses glucose for fuel but our bodies have enough stored glucose to see us through a short fast.

In one study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, scientists observed that fasting and non-fasting groups of adults performed similarly in cognitive tests, even after two days without food.

This is thought to relate to our caveman ancestors because when we don’t have food available it’s important we have the mental clarity to go out and find it.

DIABETES

With a typical Western diet it’s easy to be hungry all the time. The idea of eating little and often, which is promoted by so many diets, is about preventing your body from releasing too much insulin at once and only giving it the nutrients that it can immediately put to use. Yet to burn off body fat your insulin levels need to be low. If you eat little and often your body will always be releasing a little insulin, leading to potentially chronically high levels.

Insulin is the signal to your body to store energy from your food so it can be accessed later. It basically acts by unlocking cells and allowing individual molecules of glucose to enter. It also tells the cells to make more protein and fat and to keep the existing fat locked away inside.

This is all designed to keep blood sugar levels within a tightly controlled range. Any sugar not immediately required for energy has to be stored in the muscles or liver. High levels of insulin in the body can increase the risk of insulin resistance as those locks get “broken” and start having difficulties recognising the “key”.

Over time, insulin resistance increases the risk of diabetes. It has also been linked to cardiovascular disease and cancer.

Most studies on fasting suggest that it has a beneficial effect on blood glucose control. Increasing the gaps between meals through fasting means that you get a spike in insulin after eating, then a longer period of time where insulin isn’t involved at all.

The idea is that this not only encourages your body to burn fat, it also helps to maintain its natural sensitivity to insulin.

ANTI-AGEING

Ageing begins when your normal process of cell regeneration and rebuilding slows down. At a cellular level the growth factor (IGF-1) tells our cells to grow and multiply. If IGF-1 is kept high our cells constantly divide and multiply which is good if we’re trying to build big muscles.

However it’s less good if those cells become damaged and cancerous. High levels of IGF-1 have been linked to prostate cancer and post-menopausal breast cancer.

Gerontologist Valter Longo headed a team of researchers at the University of Southern California who focused on the effect of calorie restriction on the functioning of cells.

Research on mice found that restricting calories extended lifespan by up to 40 per cent.

Genetically engineering the mice to have low levels of IGF-1 did the same thing.

Meanwhile research on monkeys has shown that in most cases calorie restriction and intermittent fasting helps them live longer.

Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? After all, how many times have we said that we’ll “waste away” if we go a few hours without a decent meal.